https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dJ_T75oq3ec
What opinions do you have about the Biden formulation of foreign policy in relationship to China? Look, I think the Biden administration, it has done a reasonably good job so far in terms of its messaging on Taiwan and on the US-China relations, the CHIP Act, and it’s putting economic pressure, it is trying to stop the penetration. So much of Chinese growth has really come from the theft of IP and from intellectual property, from Chinese state subsidies to corporations in key sectors that are able to use those subsidies to compete unfairly in the rest of the world. And then we are beginning to see, and this, it started in the Trump years, and even President Obama talked about a pivot to Asia. So there’s been a growing awareness in the US on a need to focus more on China and not just sort of sit here and wait for capitalism to turn China democratic, which is what we were maybe doing 20 years ago. So we’re definitely ahead on that front. Okay, so let’s talk about that a little bit. I mean, so since I was a young person, what’s happened in China? Well, first of all, when I started to become politically aware, let’s say back in the 1970s, I remember going to a trade fair in Edmonton, Alberta. It was one of the first trade fairs that the Chinese participated in. That probably is about 1974 or something like that. And we went and looked at, the Chinese had a display there of their industrial products, and it looked like stuff that had been manufactured in the West right after the Second World War. Like it looked like stuff that was built in the 1950s. But that was the first time in my lifetime that we saw anything at all of China. And then of course, when I was very young, the threat of famine was still something that we associated with China. And what I’ve seen happen in my lifetime is that China has become an economic powerhouse, that the threat of famine has receded substantially, that the Chinese had been integrated, at least to some degree into the world economy, that the West had benefited arguably from an influx of unbelievably inexpensive consumer goods as Chinese manufacturing quality improved, as it did in Japan. And for a good while, it looked like the Chinese were going to settle in beside us in lockstep, even though as competitors and cooperators, and move us all towards a relatively integrated capitalist future. And of course, the presumption was that as that happened, that the state would liberalize, not least because there’d be all sorts of individuals in China who now had a certain degree of economic power. And that the Chinese would incrementally transform into, essentially into allies playing under the same system. And I think that really was happening in a pretty damn optimistic way for a number of decades till Xi decided to centralize control and turn himself into another Mao. And it isn’t obvious that the optimism that the West had in relationship to China was exactly misplaced. I mean, I think the Western working class paid a big price for integrating China. But other than that, the Chinese aren’t starving anymore, which is certainly a big plus. And there were a lot of positives attempting to integrate the Chinese into the world economy. The downside was we seemed to become more dependent on their largesse and goodwill than we needed to. And then of course, China as a totalitarian model is a destabilizing force in the international order. Well, you’re absolutely right. And I would agree with you completely that, well, look, until a few years ago, I would travel pretty freely in China. And a couple of my books have been translated into Chinese and I would speak at Chinese universities and talk with professors and officials. And the view that you just expressed was very common. This is what they felt China was doing and should do was move toward this kind of integration to become what some Chinese used to tell me, a normal country is what they wanted China to become. And I think there are a lot of people there who still hope that. Obviously, they’re not gonna say so right now. That would not be good for you or your family if you started talking that way. But I think that what happened in some ways is we tended to forget that the Chinese Communist Party is a real thing and it wants to hold power. And there are lots of people who see, they look at Chinese history. Yes, the Communist Party has killed more Chinese than anything ever in the history of the world, have died as a result of Mao’s famines and other things, far eclipsing the death toll, say in their war against Japan even. But that said, as you pointed out, the economic growth of the last 30, 35 years in China is one of the great miracles of human history. And you would have to have a heart of stone not to be glad that hundreds of millions of people have come out of poverty, that new ways of life are opening up, new access to culture, to education. It’s what we should all be doing. It’s progress and it’s good. But that very progress of the society I think terrified the Communist Party because they could see themselves losing control. They could see, and there is in Chinese history and culture, it’s a country of a billion four people, that’s like what? Four times the population of the European Union. And it’s not so easy to, Chinese history is a story of the balance between central and local governments. They’ve had periods of division and war and weakness when others have taken advantage when the central government was weak. So instead of in a way relaxing and liberalizing more as their economic policies succeeded, many in the Chinese Communist Party became really worried that things were gonna get out of control. And for a number of years, even before we saw the international hostility, what we saw was gradually in sector after sector, they were tightening up the control of the central communist elite and more and more under one man, Xi Jinping. They were tightening, using every lever they could to impose uniformity in China to reassert, even in companies now, every company has to have a Communist Party cell in it. So we’re back to the kind of Communist Party dominance. Commissars. Yes, exactly. And obviously as a Western investor, that’s a tough thing when you’ve got the Communist Party cell running your company. Do you really own the company, et cetera. So it’s a- Right, right. So they’re moving from a good period into a much more difficult one, I think. Right, well, I think also that people were optimistic and rightly so after 1989, because once the Soviets gave up the ghost, it looked for a pretty long period of time that you couldn’t beat the communist drum very hard anymore, that the internal contradictions that were part and parcel of the ethos had made themselves manifest in a manner that was utterly unmistakable. And just as the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own internal idiocy, so was the Chinese Communist Party doomed to eventual failure. And it certainly, and now, but I guess part of the problem is that even in the West, we don’t seem to be of one mind when we look at the contradiction between Western productivity and generosity, let’s say, and general wellbeing at the level of the citizen, and the contradictions between that and a radical leftist view of the world. Right, I mean, our own society is rife with this culture war predicated at least on the part that capitalism is inherently oppressive, and so is Western culture in general. And of course, the Chinese Communists believe that in spades, and if we can’t get our own house in order with regards to the pathology of these ideas in the West, in some sense, it’s not that surprising that the Chinese remain dominated by them. But the long-term consequences of that can’t be good. I mean, what I see happening, I think, in the West, in the US in particular, is that people are losing faith in China as a trading partner, and we’re starting to pull back a tremendous amount of manufacturing capacity and decreasing investment and pulling away from China as a trading partner. And of course, that’ll just make things more desperate in China, which is not a good thing.